GUATEMALA: Exit the Colonel, Complaining

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Arbenz is out. This week Guatemala, after four years of skidding toward the Soviet orbit and ten days of bombing and strafing by anti-Communist rebel invaders, found its President's Marxism and his Communist kibitzers too much. Top army officers forced him to quit, and took power with a junta of three colonels.

Arbenz flew off to exile in Buenos Aires.

The military assault that led to Colonel Arbenz' downfall was hardly a firecracker pop by modern standards. It consisted mainly of a miniature air war, waged by four obsolete rebel planes (see below).

They worked so effectively that the 2,000 tons of Communist infantry weapons that Arbenz imported last month were worthless—and he had no fighter planes of his own. As fear and tension grew in Guatemala, it became plain that the Communist jig was up.

By Sunday morning of this week there were plain signs of defection in the army and the cabinet. Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello called in U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy, sought to see what could be saved, offered to resign. Peurifoy's diplomatic answer was that he would certainly like to see the bloodshed end. He was barely back at his embassy when the phone rang again. It was Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, chief of the armed forces.

Would the Ambassador come to his house for an urgent conference? Farewell Address. Through deserted, shuttered streets went Peurifoy. Five top-ranking colonels were there, and they wanted to know whether the U.S. Ambassador would recognize a junta headed by Diaz, and help stop the fighting. What Peurifoy had to say, in the 2¾-hour talk, was not reported. But at the end Diaz and two other officers went to give Arbenz the word. The President, forced to bow for the first time in his stubborn life, burst into a rage, stormed and argued. Finally he acceded, and went on the radio for a bitter farewell in an unsteady voice breaking with emotion.

"I have made the momentous decision," he said, "to abandon the presidency. I leave power in the able hands of Colonel Diaz. I urge all revolutionary organizations to support him. I hope this decision will save the revolution."

Doctrinaire to the end, he charged that the United Fruit Co. of Boston (which lost 400,000 acres of land to Arbenz' agrarian reform program) had "tried to destroy our country" under the pretext of attacking Communism. He referred sorrowfully to the "overwhelming and tremendous means at the command of Guatemala's enemies." and signed off.